Organizational charts depict formal reporting relationships. They show who reports to whom, what functions exist, and how authority is distributed on paper. Decision flow describes how decisions actually get made, who influences them, and what informal processes determine outcomes.
These are rarely the same thing.
The org chart says the VP of Engineering approves technical decisions. Decision flow shows that a senior architect who reports three levels down actually determines technical direction because the VP defers to their judgment and teams follow their guidance regardless of formal authority.
The org chart says product managers own feature prioritization. Decision flow shows that the CEO’s preferences, a key customer’s demands, and the loudest voices in planning meetings determine what gets built.
The org chart says cross-functional collaboration happens through directors coordinating across departments. Decision flow shows that collaboration happens through informal networks of individual contributors who know each other and bypass formal channels to get work done.
Understanding decision flow requires looking past formal structure to observe who actually influences outcomes. This is harder than reading org charts. It requires tracking who gets consulted, whose objections stop initiatives, whose approval is necessary even when not formally required, and whose priorities drive resource allocation.
Organizations that confuse the org chart for reality make structural decisions based on fiction. They reorganize reporting lines expecting behavior changes that do not materialize because reporting lines were never determining behavior. They assign authority that is not exercised and remove authority that continues to be exercised informally.
The org chart is a document. Decision flow is a system. The document rarely describes the system accurately.
What Decision Flow Actually Reveals
Decision flow is not a diagram. It is a pattern of influence, consultation, veto power, and resource control that determines which options get considered and which get implemented.
Who Gets Consulted Before Decisions
Formal authority says who approves decisions. Decision flow reveals who gets consulted before decisions reach approval. The consultation pattern often matters more than the approval.
A product manager formally owns feature prioritization. But before finalizing priorities, they consult with engineering leadership to understand feasibility, with the sales team to understand revenue impact, with customer success to understand support burden, and with the CEO to understand strategic alignment.
Each consultation is a veto point. If engineering says a feature is too complex, it gets deprioritized. If sales says a feature is critical for a pending deal, it jumps the queue. If the CEO expresses skepticism, it gets shelved regardless of customer demand.
The product manager has formal authority but limited actual influence. Their role is to synthesize inputs from stakeholders who hold real decision power. The org chart shows them as the decision-maker. Decision flow shows them as a coordinator executing a decision made collectively by others.
This pattern is common. Formal decision-makers are often facilitators who aggregate input from informal decision-makers. The org chart obscures this. Decision flow makes it visible.
Whose Objections Stop Initiatives
Some people can stop initiatives without formal veto authority. Their objections carry weight that makes proceeding politically or practically impossible. Identifying who has this power reveals actual influence.
A team proposes a technical architecture change. The formal approval process involves their manager and a director. But a principal engineer who is not in the approval chain raises concerns. The concerns are technical but also political. The principal engineer has credibility, relationships with leadership, and a track record of being right.
The initiative stalls. Not because formal approvers rejected it, but because proceeding over the principal engineer’s objection is too costly. Leadership will question why concerns were ignored. Other teams will be skeptical. The political capital required to push through is not worth it.
The principal engineer has informal veto power. The org chart does not show this. Decision flow reveals it by showing which objections actually stop work.
This power is not always negative. Informal veto authority can prevent bad decisions. But it also creates invisible power structures that are unaccountable and often misaligned with organizational goals.
Who Controls Resource Allocation in Practice
Org charts show budget authority. Decision flow shows who actually controls how resources get allocated. These are often different people.
A director has budget authority for their organization. But headcount allocation decisions defer heavily to input from senior engineers who evaluate candidate skills and team fit. Vendor selection decisions defer to operational engineers who will use the tools. Project prioritization defers to product leadership who control roadmaps.
The director approves, but approval is largely rubber-stamping recommendations from people with operational context. The director has formal authority but limited practical control. The people making recommendations control resource allocation in practice.
This is rational. The director cannot evaluate every technical trade-off or operational requirement. Delegating to people with context makes sense. But the org chart shows centralized authority while decision flow shows distributed control.
When organizations try to change resource allocation by changing who has budget authority, they often fail because budget authority was not driving allocation. Informal influence was. Changing the org chart does not change decision flow.
Whose Priorities Drive Execution
Formal goal-setting processes produce documented priorities. Decision flow reveals whose priorities actually determine what teams work on.
A company has OKRs that specify strategic priorities. Teams are evaluated on OKR progress. But when the CEO mentions a customer complaint in a meeting, it becomes urgent. When a board member asks about a metric, it gets prioritized. When a key customer threatens to churn, their feature request jumps the queue.
The OKRs are on paper. Actual priorities are determined by executive reactions, customer escalations, and incident response. Teams learn to ignore formal priorities and track informal signals: what leadership talks about in meetings, what metrics they ask about, what customer names they mention.
The org chart does not explain this. Decision flow does. It shows whose attention drives urgency and whose requests cannot be ignored regardless of formal priorities.
How Decision Flow Diverges from Org Charts
The divergence between formal structure and actual decision flow follows predictable patterns. Understanding these patterns explains why reorganizations often fail to change behavior.
Expertise Concentrates Informal Authority
People with deep expertise accumulate informal authority regardless of formal position. Others defer to their judgment because they are credibly more knowledgeable. This creates decision influence independent of the org chart.
A senior engineer has spent years building the core platform. They understand architectural constraints, historical decisions, and system limitations better than anyone including their managers. When technical decisions are made, everyone consults them. Their opinion carries more weight than formal approvers.
The org chart shows them as an individual contributor. Decision flow shows them as a technical authority whose approval is necessary for any significant platform change. Managers nominally make decisions but defer to the senior engineer’s judgment.
This informal authority is earned through demonstrated competence. It cannot be granted through title or position. Reorganizing reporting structures does not change it. The expertise-based authority persists regardless of org chart changes.
Organizations that ignore expertise-based authority create decision processes that look proper on paper but are overridden in practice. Formal approvals happen, but real decisions were made in technical conversations before approval processes started.
Relationships Create Informal Channels
Work gets done through relationships. People who trust each other communicate directly, coordinate informally, and solve problems without involving formal processes. These relationship networks often matter more than reporting structures.
An engineer needs input from another team. They could follow the formal process: request through their manager, who coordinates with the other team’s manager, who assigns someone to respond. This takes days or weeks.
Instead, they message an engineer they know on the other team. They get an answer in hours. This direct relationship is not on any org chart, but it is how most cross-team collaboration actually happens.
Organizations have dense networks of these informal relationships. They are built through prior collaboration, shared history, or personal affinity. They enable work to proceed faster than formal processes allow.
The org chart shows separation between teams requiring management-layer coordination. Decision flow shows that individual contributors coordinate directly through relationship networks, bypassing management entirely.
Reorganizations that change reporting lines do not disrupt these relationships. People continue coordinating through existing networks regardless of new formal structures. This is why reorganizations often change little about how work gets done.
Information Access Determines Influence
People who have early access to information gain influence over decisions even when they have no formal authority. Information asymmetry creates power.
An executive assistant knows the CEO’s calendar, priorities, and concerns. They control access to the CEO’s time. They see which issues the CEO considers important based on what gets scheduled and what gets postponed.
This information access creates influence. Teams that want CEO attention cultivate relationships with the assistant. Proposals that align with what the assistant knows are CEO priorities get better access. The assistant has no formal decision authority but substantial practical influence.
Similarly, analysts who prepare leadership reports see data before leaders do. They choose what to highlight, how to frame trends, and which anomalies to investigate. These framing choices influence leadership reactions and subsequent decisions.
The org chart does not show information access patterns. Decision flow does. It reveals who has early information and how they use it to influence outcomes.
Crisis Response Reveals Actual Decision-Makers
Routine operations often follow formal processes. Crises bypass them. Observing who makes decisions during crises reveals who has real authority.
A production outage occurs. The formal incident response process specifies that on-call engineers diagnose, managers coordinate, and leadership is informed. In practice, a senior engineer starts issuing commands, teams follow, and the incident is resolved before management is fully briefed.
The senior engineer had no formal authority to direct other teams. But in crisis, people defer to whoever demonstrates competence and decisiveness. The org chart becomes irrelevant. Decision flow follows actual capability.
After the crisis, the org chart reasserts itself. Postmortems are written following formal processes. But everyone knows the real decision-making during the incident did not follow the org chart. It followed expertise and initiative.
Organizations that pay attention to crisis decision flow learn who really has authority when stakes are high. Organizations that only look at org charts miss this.
Budget Control Is Not Resource Control
Org charts show who approves budgets. Decision flow shows who controls how resources are actually deployed. These diverge when approval authority is centralized but operational decisions are distributed.
A VP approves annual budget allocations. But teams decide daily how to spend allocated budget. They choose vendors, prioritize hiring, and allocate contractor hours. The VP sees quarterly reports and approves large expenditures, but most resource allocation decisions happen without VP involvement.
The VP has budget authority on paper. Teams have resource control in practice. This is efficient when teams have good judgment. It creates risk when they do not.
The org chart suggests centralized resource control. Decision flow reveals distributed decision-making that the budget authority cannot meaningfully oversee. Attempts to centralize control by adding approval processes create bottlenecks without actually increasing oversight quality.
The Consequences of Mismatch Between Structure and Flow
When org charts diverge substantially from decision flow, predictable pathologies emerge. These are not cultural problems. They are structural consequences of the mismatch.
Accountability Becomes Ambiguous
Accountability requires clear ownership. Org charts assign formal responsibility. Decision flow shows that decisions are actually made collectively by people with informal influence. When outcomes fail, who is accountable?
A product launch fails. The org chart says the product manager was responsible. But decision flow shows that engineering determined feasibility, sales influenced prioritization, customer success defined requirements, and leadership set timeline constraints. The product manager coordinated inputs but did not control the decision.
Who is accountable for the failure? The product manager who had formal responsibility but limited authority? The engineers who set constraints? The executives who set timelines? The sales team who pushed features?
Accountability diffuses. Everyone contributed to the decision. No one clearly owns the outcome. The org chart suggests the product manager should be accountable, but decision flow shows this is unfair given their limited influence.
Organizations with large mismatches between structure and flow have systematically ambiguous accountability. Formal responsibility is assigned to people who lack decision authority. Actual decision-makers are not formally accountable.
Political Skill Becomes More Important Than Execution Skill
When decision flow diverges from org charts, navigating informal influence becomes critical. People who understand the real decision-making network succeed. People who follow formal processes fail.
An engineer proposes a technical improvement. They follow the formal process: document the proposal, present to their manager, get approval, begin work. The work is blocked because a senior engineer who was not in the approval chain objects.
A more politically skilled engineer would have consulted the senior engineer before formal approval. They would have understood that real authority sits with expertise, not formal position. They would have navigated the informal network instead of the formal process.
Organizations where decision flow diverges from structure reward political navigation over execution competence. Success depends on knowing who really decides, whose objections matter, and how to build informal coalitions. Technical excellence is necessary but not sufficient.
This selects for politicians over builders. People who are good at execution but poor at organizational navigation fail despite competence. People who are good at politics but mediocre at execution succeed.
Reorganizations Fail to Change Behavior
Organizations reorganize to change behavior. They change reporting lines, create new roles, and redistribute authority. But if decision flow is based on expertise, relationships, and information access rather than org chart position, reorganization changes little.
A company moves engineers from functional teams to product teams expecting better product focus. The org chart changes. But engineers continue consulting the same technical experts, coordinating through the same relationship networks, and deferring to the same informal authorities.
Decision flow is unchanged. The reorganization created new reporting lines but did not shift actual influence patterns. Behavior changes minimally.
Reorganizations fail when they assume the org chart determines decision flow. The org chart is a document. Decision flow is a system shaped by expertise, relationships, and information access. Changing the document does not change the system.
Formal Processes Become Theater
When decisions are actually made through informal channels but organizations require formal processes, the processes become theater. People perform the process without it influencing outcomes.
A company requires business cases for all projects. Teams produce detailed documents with ROI calculations, risk analyses, and success metrics. The documents are reviewed and approved.
But actual decisions were made before the business case was written. Executives already decided to fund the project based on informal conversations. The business case is justification written after the decision, not analysis informing it.
The formal process exists. It consumes time and creates documentation. It does not influence decisions. It is theater performed to satisfy organizational requirements while real decisions happen elsewhere.
Organizations with large structure-flow mismatches have extensive process theater. Approval workflows, documentation requirements, and review meetings exist and are followed, but they do not affect outcomes. Decision flow bypasses them.
Shadow Organizations Emerge
When formal structure does not enable effective decision-making, shadow organizations emerge. Informal networks of people who actually make decisions, allocate resources, and drive execution.
A company has a formal product development process with defined roles and approval gates. In practice, a group of senior engineers, key product managers, and a sympathetic executive meet informally to decide technical direction, prioritize projects, and allocate resources.
This shadow organization is not on any org chart. It has no formal authority. But it determines what gets built. The formal organization executes decisions made by the shadow organization.
Shadow organizations form when formal structures are ineffective but cannot be changed. They enable work to proceed despite organizational dysfunction. But they are also unaccountable, invisible, and often misaligned with stated organizational goals.
Organizations that acknowledge shadow organizations can sometimes formalize them and make them accountable. Organizations that ignore them allow informal power structures to control outcomes without oversight.
When Org Charts Actually Matter
Org charts are not useless. They matter in specific contexts where formal authority actually determines outcomes. Understanding when org charts predict decision flow versus when they do not is critical.
Resource Allocation Decisions
Org charts predict decision flow when resources are centralized and allocation requires formal approval. Budget authority, headcount allocations, and capital expenditure decisions often follow formal structure.
A director requests additional headcount. The VP must approve. The org chart accurately predicts this decision flow. The VP has budget authority and exercises it. Informal influence may shape the request, but formal approval is required.
This is different from day-to-day resource decisions where allocation happens through distributed choices that bypass formal approval. Org charts matter for centralized resource allocation. They matter less for distributed operational decisions.
Performance Evaluation and Career Advancement
Org charts determine who evaluates performance and recommends promotion. Your manager on the org chart typically controls your performance rating and promotion prospects, even if informal leaders influence your day-to-day work.
An engineer may take technical direction from a senior engineer who is a peer on the org chart. But their performance review is written by their formal manager. The formal reporting relationship matters for career outcomes even when it does not determine daily work.
This creates tension. Success may require navigating informal influence networks, but career advancement depends on formal manager relationships. The mismatch creates politics where people must satisfy both informal decision-makers and formal evaluators.
Legal and Compliance Authority
Org charts matter for legal and compliance purposes. Regulatory filings, audit processes, and legal accountability follow formal structure. You cannot tell regulators that decisions are actually made by an informal network.
A company must designate officers with legal authority. These designations follow org chart positions. The CFO has financial signing authority. The CTO has technical compliance responsibility. These formal authorities cannot be bypassed through informal decision flow.
When legal or compliance issues arise, org chart authority becomes real. The people with formal responsibility are held accountable regardless of whether they made day-to-day decisions.
Executive-Level Strategic Decisions
At the highest organizational levels, formal authority matters more because fewer people are involved and relationships are managed directly. The CEO makes strategic decisions that actually follow from their formal authority.
Board-level decisions about M&A, fundraising, or CEO succession follow formal governance structures. The board has legal authority and exercises it. Informal influence exists but is constrained by fiduciary duty and governance requirements.
This is different from operational decisions where informal networks dominate. At the executive level, formal structure predicts decision flow more accurately.
How to Understand Decision Flow in Your Organization
Decision flow is not documented. Understanding it requires observation, conversation, and pattern recognition. Organizations that want to understand how decisions really get made must look past formal processes.
Map Consultation Patterns, Not Approval Chains
Approval chains are on org charts. Consultation patterns reveal decision flow. Track who gets consulted before decisions are finalized. These people have informal veto power.
Interview people who make decisions. Ask who they consult. Ask whose input they need. Ask whose objections would stop them from proceeding. The answers reveal the informal decision network.
A product manager consults with engineering on feasibility, sales on revenue impact, and customer success on support burden. These consultations are not formally required but practically necessary. The consultation network is the real decision structure.
Mapping consultation patterns shows who influences decisions regardless of formal authority.
Observe Crisis Decision-Making
Crises bypass formal processes. Observing who takes charge during crises reveals who has actual authority based on competence and credibility rather than position.
During incidents, who issues directives? Who do teams look to for decisions? Whose judgment is trusted under pressure? These are the people with real authority.
The pattern may differ from the org chart. Formal incident commanders may defer to technical experts. Managers may step back and let senior engineers lead. Crisis reveals the hierarchy based on capability.
Organizations can learn from crisis patterns. If informal leaders consistently outperform formal authority during crises, consider whether the org chart should reflect actual capability-based authority.
Track Which Metrics Actually Drive Behavior
Organizations have documented goals and metrics. Teams often ignore them in favor of metrics that leadership actually cares about. Identifying which metrics drive behavior reveals actual priorities.
Ask teams what metrics they track daily. Ask what they worry about when presenting to leadership. Ask what metrics have caused escalations or consequences. The answers show real priorities.
These may differ from documented OKRs. The documented goals say customer satisfaction. The real priority is revenue. The documented goal says quality. The real priority is shipping fast. Decision flow follows real priorities, not documented ones.
Identify Information Bottlenecks
Information bottlenecks reveal power. People who control information access have influence over decisions. Map who sees information first, who controls reporting, and who decides what gets escalated.
Who compiles reports for leadership? Who briefs executives before meetings? Who controls access to customers or user data? These people shape what decision-makers know and when they know it.
Information control is invisible on org charts but critical to decision flow. People with information access influence how situations are framed and which options get considered.
Follow Resource Allocation in Practice
Budget authority is formal. Resource allocation is practical. Track how resources are actually deployed. Who makes hiring decisions? Who selects vendors? Who prioritizes work? These people control resources regardless of budget authority.
Interview teams about how they decide what to work on, how they allocate time, and how they choose tools and services. The answers reveal distributed decision-making that may not match budget approval structures.
If decision-making is broadly distributed, attempts to centralize control through org chart changes will fail. The decision distribution is based on operational necessity, not formal authority.
How to Align Decision Flow with Organizational Intent
The goal is not perfect alignment between org charts and decision flow. Some divergence is inevitable and healthy. But large mismatches create dysfunction. Organizations can reduce harmful divergence through structural choices.
Assign Formal Authority to Actual Decision-Makers
If informal leaders are making decisions, formalize their authority. Promote people based on actual influence rather than tenure or political skill. Match formal structure to informal reality.
A senior engineer effectively sets technical direction. The org chart shows them as an individual contributor. Teams defer to their judgment. Decisions route through them informally.
Promote them to a formal technical leadership role that matches their actual authority. This creates accountability for decisions they are already making and makes the power structure visible and discussable.
Organizations resist this because it threatens existing hierarchy. Managers whose formal authority is not exercised lose status. But maintaining fictional authority structures creates dysfunction.
Make Informal Consultation Networks Explicit
If decisions require consultation with specific people, formalize the consultation. Create explicit stakeholder review processes that match actual consultation patterns.
Product decisions informally require engineering, sales, and customer success input. Formalize this by making their consultation mandatory in the product approval process. This makes the decision structure visible and ensures consultation happens consistently.
Formalization may add overhead but reduces ambiguity. It clarifies who has input versus who decides. It prevents consultation from being skipped when politically inconvenient.
Distribute Authority to Match Information Distribution
Decision authority should sit with people who have relevant information. If information is distributed, authority should be too. If information is centralized, authority can be.
Teams have operational context that managers lack. Decisions requiring operational context should be team-level. Managers should decide strategic direction but not operational implementation.
Organizations that centralize authority while distributing information create decision bottlenecks. Managers make decisions without adequate context. Teams have context but not authority.
Aligning authority with information reduces the need for informal workarounds and shadow decision processes.
Create Explicit Escalation Paths Based on Actual Practice
If certain issues always escalate to specific people, formalize the escalation path. Make explicit what is currently implicit.
Technical architecture issues informally escalate to a principal engineer. Security issues escalate to a specific team lead. Customer escalations go to a particular product manager. These informal patterns exist because these people have relevant expertise or authority.
Formalize these escalation paths. Document that architecture questions route to the principal engineer. Security issues route to the team lead. Customer escalations route to the product manager.
This reduces ambiguity, ensures consistent escalation, and makes the decision structure teachable to new people.
Measure Decision Latency and Quality
Track how long decisions take and whether outcomes are good. If decision latency is high, investigate whether it is because formal processes do not match actual decision flow.
Decisions that require both formal approval and informal consultation take longer than decisions requiring only one. If formal and informal structures are misaligned, every decision requires navigating both, increasing latency.
Measuring decision latency highlights where structure and flow are mismatched and creating inefficiency.
The Organizations That Maintain Alignment
Some organizations maintain better alignment between org charts and decision flow. They do this through deliberate structural choices and cultural practices.
They Promote Based on Actual Influence, Not Tenure
These organizations observe who actually influences decisions and promotes them into formal leadership. They do not wait for tenure or title progression. They match formal authority to demonstrated influence.
This creates org charts that reflect reality. The people shown as leaders are actually leading. Formal authority is exercised rather than bypassed.
This requires overriding conventional promotion criteria. Someone with three years of experience may have more influence than someone with ten years. Promoting based on influence rather than tenure is culturally difficult but structurally sound.
They Make Decision Rights Explicit
These organizations document who decides what. Not who approves on paper, but who actually makes decisions in practice. They update these decision rights as reality changes.
This documentation makes decision flow visible. New people learn how decisions are actually made, not how they are theoretically supposed to be made. Mismatches between documented decision rights and practice are surfaced and addressed.
Most organizations document idealized decision processes that are ignored in practice. These organizations document actual practice and enforce it.
They Keep Hierarchies Flat to Reduce Divergence
The more hierarchical layers, the more opportunities for decision flow to diverge from structure. Flat organizations have fewer layers, making it easier to maintain alignment.
A three-layer organization has limited room for informal authority to diverge from formal structure. A seven-layer organization has extensive room for shadow hierarchies and informal networks to emerge.
These organizations resist adding layers. They keep teams small and reporting paths short. This makes formal and informal structures more likely to align.
They Tolerate Informal Authority When It Is Expertise-Based
These organizations accept that expertise creates informal authority. They do not fight it or pretend it does not exist. They incorporate it into decision processes.
Senior technical experts have consultation rights on technical decisions even if they are not managers. Domain experts are involved in relevant decisions regardless of org chart position.
This formalization of expertise-based authority prevents shadow organizations from forming. The expertise is acknowledged and incorporated rather than exercised informally.
They Measure and Optimize for Decision Quality Over Process Compliance
These organizations assess whether decisions are good, not whether they followed documented processes. This encourages people to use whatever decision process works, including informal consultation.
If informal consultation produces better decisions than formal processes, the informal consultation gets formalized. The organization adapts structure to match effective practice rather than enforcing ineffective processes.
Most organizations optimize for process compliance. These organizations optimize for decision outcomes and adapt processes accordingly.
The Cost of Large Structure-Flow Mismatches
Organizations with large mismatches between org charts and decision flow pay costs that are diffuse but real.
Decision Latency Increases
Every decision must navigate both formal approval processes and informal influence networks. This doubles coordination overhead and increases latency.
A proposal requires manager approval (formal) and senior engineer consultation (informal). Both must be satisfied. If they disagree, the decision is blocked despite formal approval. Resolving the conflict adds delay.
Organizations with aligned structure and flow have single decision paths. Misaligned organizations have parallel processes that must both be satisfied.
New People Cannot Navigate the Organization
New hires learn the org chart but cannot understand how work gets done. They follow formal processes and fail because real decisions happen through informal networks they cannot see.
It takes months or years to learn the informal decision structure. During this learning period, new people are ineffective. They escalate to formal authorities who do not actually decide. They skip consultations with informal authorities who have veto power.
Organizations with aligned structure and flow are navigable by new people. The org chart accurately describes how decisions work. Misaligned organizations require long socialization periods to learn invisible structures.
Political Capital Becomes the Primary Resource
Success depends on understanding and navigating informal power structures. Political capital becomes more valuable than execution competence. The organization selects for politicians over builders.
High performers who are politically naive fail. Mediocre performers who are politically sophisticated succeed. This is rational individual optimization in misaligned organizations. It is catastrophic for organizational outcomes.
Accountability Disappears
When decision authority is informal and responsibility is formal, accountability fails. The people making decisions are not formally responsible. The people who are formally responsible did not make decisions.
Failures trigger blame games. Formal authority claims they lacked information or were overruled by informal influence. Informal authority claims they only advised; formal authority made the final call. No one is accountable.
Organizations with aligned structure have clear accountability. The person with formal authority exercised it. If the decision fails, they own it.
Strategy Execution Becomes Unreliable
Strategic initiatives require coordinated decision-making. If decision flow does not match org chart, strategy execution becomes unpredictable.
Leadership announces a strategic priority. The org chart suggests that certain roles will drive execution. But decision flow shows that informal networks control resource allocation and priority-setting. The formal roles cannot execute because they lack actual authority.
The strategy fails not because it was wrong but because the organizational structure could not execute it. The org chart showed execution capability that did not exist.
The Reality Most Organizations Face
Most organizations have some divergence between org charts and decision flow. Complete alignment is rare and probably undesirable. Expertise-based informal authority is often valuable. Relationship networks enable efficient collaboration. Shadow organizations sometimes solve problems that formal structures cannot.
The question is degree. Small divergences are healthy. Large divergences create dysfunction that compounds over time.
Organizations should periodically map actual decision flow and compare it to formal structure. Where mismatches are large, ask whether the org chart should change to reflect reality or whether informal patterns should be disrupted to align with formal structure.
Often the answer is mixed. Some informal authority should be formalized. Some formal authority should be eliminated. Some relationship networks should be enabled. Some shadow organizations should be disbanded.
The work is diagnosing which mismatches are beneficial and which are pathological. This requires looking past the comfort of org charts and observing how decisions actually get made.
Org charts are documents. Decision flow is reality. Organizations that confuse the two design structures that do not work and then wonder why execution fails.
Understanding how decisions actually get made is harder than reading an org chart. It is also the only way to build organizational structures that match the reality of work.